I’ve got 300+ CDs and I married a women with a bunch more. I have Sony 400 CD jukebox (an earlier version of this) but I’m not sure I want to hook it back up and type back in all the CD details (it’s erased after being in storage).
I have this very nice PC that I have already ripped everything to, but I really don’t want to turn my PC into a stereo by itself and it’s too far from the living room to run cables for an audio feed (and I don’t want to room hop to select music).
So, I was thinking about buying/building a dedicated PC-like thing to attach, just like a CD player, to my stereo for music. It’d be nice if it could download all the song titles for new CD’s inserted into it and if I could transfer my already ripped stuff to it. I guess, therefore, it needs to be networked.
I’m not sure what to do for a display - the TV is right there so it could use that for a screen or maybe just some sort of LCD front panel thing.
Any good ideas on how to buy/construct something like this?
You can try the Squeezebox before you buy it by installing the SqueezeCenter server software and running the SoftSqueeze emulator. It behaves exactly like the hardware Squeezebox so you can get a feel for how easy it is to use. You can download it at Logitech | Official Online Store (it’s included in the SqueezeCenter package, which is free to download).
SqueezeCenter is open source and has a large community of people who create lots of cool new features and plug-ins.
How does the Squeezebox work? Does it use the plug and play standard that is out there for these sorts of media devices or does it use its own protocol?
I use a dedicated Mac Mini, with an external FireWire 400GB drive. I can store 1,000 CDs losslessly compressed, play DVDs, listen to streaming music, watch Digital TV, etc.
I have a Squeezebox at home, and it’s pretty slick.
At the core of it all is a few hundred CDs all ripped as MP3 files, and cataloged by iTunes. (we’re all-Mac at home, but Squeeze will also work with iTunes on a Windows PC.)
The Squeezebox is plugged into the home network (or it can run on WiFi) and communicates with the host computer via a small server application. In the initial setup, I just tell it to let iTunes do the cataloging and indexing.
By whatever black-box magic, the Squeezebox now functions essentially like an iPod - it has access to all of the music and playlists that are in iTunes.
A few notes -
A Squeezebox will only play Apple’s AAC files if it’s connected to a Mac. Some sort of licensing issue, I guess. Simple fix that’s condoned by Apple is to burn your iTunes Store purchases to an audio CD, then rip that CD as MP3 files.
You can run a Squeezebox via WiFi, but it can suck a lot of bandwidth - you may have issues if you’re trying to play music and download files off the internet. I plugged mine into a wired connection to avoid this.
The user interface of the earlier models takes some getting used to. I hear that they’ve improved it on the current versions.
FWIW, I’m pretty close to upgrading to an AppleTV - the user interface is much nicer as it’s through the TV, rather than through a two-line text display, and it doesn’t need the SlimServer application.